Moz Local: Fixing the Accuracy Pain&nbspPoint

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]

At the end of last year, we launched Moz Local Insights, and then I read this comment on Phil Rozek’s blog:

“To be honest, we’ve been finding issues in the citation quality — it seems like their directory partners are changing up how they update information and not keeping stuff as consistent as we’d all like. I’d like Moz to focus on that and make that rock solid first — because right now, we really can’t rely on the results we’re getting from InsiderPages and SuperPages (for example). And listings that were “fixed” magically get unfixed weeks later — I don’t think this is Moz’s fault, but I do think they want to have a “red alert” feature when something gets broken that was previously resolved.”

Well, that wasn’t the comment I was looking for when we launched an important addition to Moz Local. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire. We took that blog comment and other feedback to heart, and we’ve spent our time since Insights launched on just this.

So how did we put out this fire? Well first, here’s a bit of backstory:

When Moz Local launched two years ago, the bubbles next to each listing in the dashboard were to let customers know that Moz Local was working for them. We provided simple transparency into how things were working with each of our partners.

The bubbles are popular, but they also raise two questions:

Why isn’t my listing accurate on X partner?

What goes into determining whether my listing is accurate for a given partner?

Better distribution

In February, we started the process of figuring out why our bubble gun wasn’t producing green bubbles. Hundreds of emails with partners, and countless (actually, probably countable) hours later, the process of submitting a listing to a partner and having that accepted has improved dramatically across the board.

The end result of all the hard work put into making listing distribution perfect: Listings submitted to Moz Local see an average accuracy score increase of 28% within 3 months. That’s a large lift across a large set of listings independent of size.

Step 1 was improving the underlying Moz Local distribution with partners. Step 2 was to make needed visual improvements for people to better understand their accuracy and what makes up that accuracy.

Better visualization

So, we’ve replaced the accuracy bubbles with an overall accuracy score and a bar graph that breaks the accuracy score down by its factors:

Name

Address

Phone number

Website

Categories

If you don’t have 100% accuracy, then you can find out which critical component of the listing is contributing to that issue.

Quick side note: "Listing score" is the same score you see on the Moz Local Check Listing service. It grades a listing based on accuracy, completeness of categories and photos, and whether or not a listing has duplicates. The "accuracy score" is just to measure NAP+WC consistency of distribution partners. So, listing score is a superset of accuracy score and includes other important sites like Google and Facebook.

We think the accuracy score is more representative of the progress that your listing has made since it has been distributed with Moz Local. The factors are there to help understand across the partners where the gaps are. However, we realized that being Local SEO experts arming you with data helps you diagnose problems better. So, we’ve also broken all of the data factors down by partner.

The expanded accuracy factors view allows you to see whether you’re having an issue with a particular attribute of your listing or if it’s a distribution partner that is having issues with your data. For example, if the company you manage does a name change, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the name across partners show as inaccurate. In this example, the fact that I haven’t associated a Foursquare account with the listing helps explain why there are accuracy issues.

We hope existing Moz Local customers are excited about these changes. There is more work to be done, and I’m looking forward to sharing those improvements soon.

About dudleycarr —

Worked at Moz for over 4 years as the Moz Local business owner, a VP of Engineering across groups, and as an individual contributor on weekends. Prior to Moz, I worked as a product manager and engineering at Google, and have filled the voids with startups focused on consumer services.

"...the bubbles next to each listing in the dashboard...", those bubbles were a client enhancement request. Moz does a fantastic job at listening to its user community and finding solutions to their problems, Hat's off to them for their efforts! Well done (again) Moz.

I think this is a great addition - but then quickly begs the question... what do I do with this information?

Example, one of my listings now tells me that Citysearch and Insiderpages aren't digging my website information. But, I've had that information in my Moz listing for over a year. Am I supposed to re-submit? As I'm supposed to go to those directories now directly?

But I'm saying it's a continual issue with Moz, 8-9 months and duplicates still exist at these sites you push data to, or data still isn't updated and consistent with the data we have submitted through Moz.

I took a quick look at your listing that isn't accurate on CitySearch / Insiderpages. The good news is that the listing does exist on both properties and it looks to be accurate. The downside is that we're not reporting as such because the API we have with them isn't returning the result when we search for it -- I believe it's due to punctuation. I'll follow up with them about that, but then that listing ought to be in good shape. Thanks for speaking up.

So, would that be the protocol on these? If we check out our listings on those sites and everything seems like it should be accurate but isn't showing as such, should we reach out to you all? Or, should we ourselves reach out to those directories? Thanks Neil, appreciate the response.

If our information is accurate on CitySearch then it will be accurate on InsiderPages as well. Like the help team response stated, InsiderPages doesn't provide a way for each to search and link directly to the listing. Hope that helps.

Thanks for that. However, is there some way to view that page for a single listing. Ours aren't separate "locations", but actually separate businesses. I'd like to be able to select a single business and see the graphs for that one location.

So the reporting is based on the current "selection" of listings in your dashboard. By default, it is all listings. There are two ways to filter the selection and then see the reporting just for those locations. First, you can search for something that all of those locations have in common, perhaps their name. Second, you can also label those locations and then select the label to filter the locations and then look at the reports.

Thanks for upgrading Moz Local, I have long found our listings to be inaccurate. Look for my email w/ the inaccurate listings.

BTW: Moz has grown exponentially in the past year plus, it is MUCH BETTER and the new additions make Moz the best guide in SEO. Also, community forum is a great place to get expert opinions on any SEO question.

Good Job!

Kevin

WOW! after reading your post and exploring the improvements, I went to the listings in question, logged-in or created the account, tried to make edits (not all would let me) returned to comment on this post AND LOW AND BEHOLD when I rechecked our listings...FIXED!